Doctor’s work with wood, music takes his mind off stresses of daily life

Dr. Ken Kaplan, a Greeley pediatrician, works on earaches and strep throats at the office.

At home, he works on wood and music, hobbies that led to the creation of Kaplan’s masterpiece: an archtop guitar he constructed by hand.

Take a look at the instrument and you’ll see mother-of-pearl inlays, beautifully grained wood and meticulously carved surfaces, airbrushed and varnished to glossy perfection.

What you’ll also see in Kaplan’s guitar is a prescription for good mental health.

Hobbies, whether painstaking as building a musical instrument or as simple as watching birds, rejuvenate the mind and relax the body.

“It certainly takes your mind off the stresses of daily life and being a pediatrician,” Kaplan said.

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Novelist Ayn Rand conveyed the same idea in her essay “Why I like Stamp Collecting.”

“A hobby can be a remedy for mental fatigue resulting from a profession that involves bringing work home. Often, an hour at a hobby will make you able to resume your work,” Rand wrote. “It can be an effective brain-restorer.”

Medical benefits of hobbies were revealed in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study showed that people who engage in hobbies such as jigsaw or crossword puzzles, playing musical instruments, chess or other board games, knitting and woodwork succumb more slowly to the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers think that’s probably because brain-challenging activities prompt the brain to build up a reserve of neuron connections. And that means it takes longer for the Alzheimer’s process to destroy enough neurons for symptoms to appear.

But Kaplan looks at his hobby in terms that aren’t so clinical.

He sees it as art.

It’s easy to agree when Kaplan describes how he converted instructions in a book called “Making an Archtop Guitar” into an instrument that sounds as smooth and lovely as it looks.

Kaplan had to be a sculptor, musician and painter to produce his guitar, a process that took two years.

He thumped raw wood to determine the pitch it would produce as a finished instrument.

He used a hand-held shaving device to carve the face and back of the instrument into gently protruding surfaces. And he fashioned little pieces of mother of pearl into shapes — including the letter K — that he inlaid into the neck of the guitar.

Kaplan, 53, can now call himself a “luthier,” which is the term for a guitar-maker.

But when he started woodworking, he was just a high school kid who needed a bookshelf.

“It was horrible — some pine boards nailed together,” Kaplan said.

Throughout his house are the objects such as coffee and dining tables, buffets and an almost-finished bed frame Kaplan created after he became more skillful. His handmade guitar sits on a stand, and often on Kaplan’s lap.

Which is evidence that you don’t necessarily have to be a master at a hobby to reap the benefits.

Kaplan, who started taking jazz guitar lessons about two years ago, said he’s not as good as he’d like to be.

“I’ve been playing music of one sort or another — mostly badly –all of my life,” he said.

But as with any hobby, learning an instrument and building one are as much about the process as the end result.

“A hobby allows the individual hobbyist to remain in his own private world, under his control. Depending on the hobby, he can avoid the dishonesty and irrationality of other people he often must deal with in a career,” Rand wrote in her essay on stamp collecting. “Nobody can interfere with his hobby, nobody needs to be considered or questioned or worried about. The choices, the work, the responsibility — and the enjoyment — are one’s own.”